Not in Anyone's Backyard: The Emergence and Identity of a Transnational Anti-Base Network

Providing an overview of the emergence, characteristics, trajectory, and potential limitations of the transnational anti-base network, this article focuses on two broad questions relevant to transnational politics. First, what processes and mechanisms enabled local and transnational activists to form the international No Bases network? Second, how did activists juxtapose existing local anti-base identity and frames to emerging transnational ones? Following existing transnational movement theories, I argue that the global anti-base network slowly emerged through processes of diffusion and scale shift in its early stages. The onset of the Iraq War, however, injected new life into the transnational anti-base movement, eventually leading to the inaugural International Conference for the Abolition of Foreign Bases in 2007. Although loose transnational ties existed among anti-base activists prior to 2003, the U.S. war in Iraq presented anti-base activists the global frames necessary to accelerate the pace of diffusion, scale-shift, and brokerage, and hence, the consolidation of a transnational anti-base network. Paradoxically, however, even as No Bases leaders attempted to forge a new transnational identity, anti-base activists, as "rooted cosmopolitans," continued to anchor their struggle in local initiatives.     

Discursive Multilateralism: Global Benchmarks, Shame, and Learning in the ILO Labor Standards Monitoring Regime

A distinct feature of contemporary international relations is the proliferation of multilateral monitoring regimes. Despite the significance of this for the study of international law and organization, little empirical evaluation of the effectiveness of multilateral monitoring exists. This article examines the effectiveness of the supervisory system of the International Labor Organization (ILO), widely recognized as the prototypical model for all multilateral monitoring regimes. I examine the speech acts and rule-practices of the ILO regime within a hermeneutic/constructivist framework. This yields a set of heuristic hypotheses reflective of the "logic" that guides regime interactions with its member states. This asserts that "shame" influences member states to comply and respond positively to regime obligations. To test this, I statistically generate global benchmarks. These consist of world and regional averages in the behavioral patterns of member states. Quantitative findings demonstrate recidivist patterns of deviance by "global pariahs" set against a statistical background consisting of large-scale normative conformity on the part of ILO member states but configured around some regional variations. My analysis contends that global benchmarking reduces the risks of member state defection from core international labor standards and thereby promotes monitoring by learning or discursive multilateralism.     

World Economic Prospects in the Next Ten Years

The world economy,which has displayed unprecedented changes in the 21st century,has three characteristics: the collective rise of emerging powers,the escalating development of globalization,and the further deterioration of global imbalances. International economic development,the relationship between market demand and supply,the balance of power between South and North,and world economic relations and world order are in a state of constant flux. In the next ten years,the world economy will follow a trend th...     

International Migration as Criminal Behaviour: Shifting Responsibility to the Migrant in Mexico–US Border Crossings

* I would like to thank Brent J. Steele for his valuable insight on the theory of governmentality as it pertains to this article. I would also like to thank Rob Topinka and Franziska Jung for their feedback on earlier versions of the article, and participants on the panel “Political Economy of Migration in Latin America” at the International Studies Association Annual Convention 2011 in Montreal for helpful insight on this work as a burgeoning research project. View all notesThe increasing criminalisation of immigration procedures has the effect of shifting responsibility from the state to the individual migrant for alleged “criminal” behaviour. This shift represents a form of disciplinary power as it is enacted over “deviant” populations who are unable to self-govern according to the tenets required in a system of global governmentality. In this article, I use Foucault's governmentality to examine the “responsibilisation” of undocumented migrants who are perceived as making a rational choice to cross the border. I argue that the criminalisation of immigration shifts the emphasis to individuals as rational actors who have rejected paths to legal immigration, choosing “illegal” immigration, which carries the connotation of criminal behaviour. This constructs a population of always already criminal subjects who are understood to disregard the rule of law. In this research I carry out a critical discourse analysis that looks at the performative conceptualisation of “illegal immigrants” and the production and reproduction of the understanding of migrants as criminals. I look at the example of Mexico–US border crossings from the perspective of a system of global governmentality and I posit that international undocumented migration is criminalised and migrants are “responsibilised”, which effectively controls the movement of peoples, contributing to a geopolitical discourse that represents population management at the global level.     

Summary of Symposium on the First Anniversary of the World Financial Crisis

When Lehman Brothers Holding Inc., the prominent investment bank, was allowed to go bankrupt without proper preparation on September 15, 2008, a global financial tsunami arose, dragging the world＇s economy into a period of great crisis. Just one year later, on September 15, 2009, a seminar titled ＂the First Anniversary of the World Financial Crisis＂ was organized in Beijing by the Globalization Research Center of the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations （CICIR）. Experts attending the seminar shared their views on the primary cause of the financial crisis, the dynamic trend of the post--crisis world structure, and China＇s status in this tremendously changed world. The discussions are summarized below.     

Interwar Internationalism, the British Labour Party, and the Historiography of International Relations

This article questions two interrelated myths pertaining to the interwar internationalism of the British Labour Party and the theories of so-called idealists in the academic discipline of International Relations (IR). In IR, interwar "idealists" are (in)famous for a detached and utopian approach to international politics. Conventional historiographical verdicts on the international policy of the Labour Party in the interwar period suggest that the party was the practical mirror of this naïve international outlook. In fact, the two themes are connected, most notably through Labour's Advisory Committee on International Questions . This article brings the study of Labour's internationalism and the international theories of purported idealists together by focusing on debates on the League of Nations and the use of force. The analysis reveals that conventional historiographical narratives are inadequate and too simplistic for grasping the diversity of Labour's internationalism and interwar progressivist ideas about international politics in general.     

Willingness and Opportunity: A Study of Domestic Terrorism in Post-Cold War South Asia

Domestic terrorism, as a form of intrastate violence, has varied widely in South Asia along with the post-Cold War period of global economic integration and political openness. How are these two phenomena—economic integration and emergence of democracies—related to domestic terrorism in South Asia? I argue that resorting to terrorism is a rational choice when individuals'/groups' cost of heterogeneity—deprivation from public goods due to geographical and ideological distance—increases; opportunity is provided by democratization and integration into the global economy. The testable hypotheses derived from the theory are empirically tested on a dataset of five South Asian countries for the time period between 1990 and 2007. The results show that both minority discrimination and presence of unconsolidated democratic institutions increase terrorism in the highly heterogeneous South Asian countries. International trade in the presence of minority discrimination increases homegrown terrorism, but foreign direct investment neither increases nor decreases such incidents.     

Lobbying as a Private Good with Intra-Industry Trade

Intra-industry trade—trade in different varieties of the same product between countries with similar factor endowments—has been an important and surprising feature of the postwar international economy. Economists have explained this trade with models of monopolistic competition, which suggest that intra-industry trade does not have the stark distributional consequences that the more traditional "endowments-based" trade does. I do not dispute that claim here, although I do dispute a political implication drawn from it—that intra-industry trade produces less political action than endowments-based trade. I argue that, because firms involved in intra-industry trade are monopolists, lobbying essentially becomes a private good . If intra-industry trade places costs on firms, they do not have less incentive to take political action to stop it, as the conventional wisdom suggests. I provide evidence for this contention from complaints lodged with the International Trade Commission. The results show that the higher the degree of intra-industry trade the more likely an industry will request protection from the ITC.     

Taking production relations seriously: the role of defence firms in armaments cooperation

ABSTRACT

Coordinating defence-industrial relations towards harmonising and facilitating procurement policies, production processes and the joint operability of their member-states’ national defence sectors, International Armaments Organisations (IAOs) play an important role in armaments cooperation. How can we explain their institutional development? Existing literature tackles this question using International Relations theories to mid-range theories of institutions and integration. However, they adopt overly state-centric viewpoints, assume actor interests as given, and disregard the changes in the global economic landscape that constitute the backdrop of armaments cooperation. In response, we shift the focus onto a key group of actors: the defence firms. Using a Neo-Gramscian Historical Materialist approach, we investigate how the globalisation of the defence market has created a transnational defence-industrial class in Europe, and demonstrate how its economic interests have fundamentally shaped the institutional frameworks of European IAOs. We focus on the Organisation for Joint Armaments Cooperation (OCCAR) and the European Defence Agency (EDA) to illustrate our argument. Our conclusions have implications for the study of armaments cooperation, particularly highlighting how the economic nature of this policy domain necessitates a closer look at the global and regional production relations, and the agency of the defence firms.     

Ideas and interests in global financial governance: comparing German and US preference formation

Financial crises underline the necessity for more effective global governance. Despite the creation of the Basel II Accord, no agreement has been reached on the reform of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Why do governments only selectively agree to reform global governance? I argue that convergence and divergence of governmental positions cannot be explained solely by the logic of the international system, institutions or globalization. Instead, they strongly reflect domestic ideas and interests. Furthermore, the ability of governments to compromise internationally is influenced by the different impact of domestic ideas and interests. With regard to their prevalence in domestic preference formation, ideas prevail when governance affects lobby groups diffusely and poses fundamental questions on the role of politics in governing the economy. Interests prevail when lobby groups are affected directly and new governance concerns a specific distribution of costs. These arguments are tested on the preference formation of the United States and German governments on the IMF and Basel II.     

Looking Beyond the National Level: Foreign Direct Investment Attraction in U.S. States

International relations scholars need to look beyond the national level because U.S. states and governors are increasingly important actors in world politics. One way to look at their international activities is by examining the ways in which U.S. states seek to attract foreign direct investment (FDI), just one research puzzle at the nexus of international relations and U.S. state politics, two fields that rarely talk to one another. After pointing out the gaps within theories from international relations and international political economy, this paper describes the evolving global roles of both U.S. states and governors and shows how U.S. states attract FDI through the use of their international offices and governor-led overseas missions. Empirical findings indicate that U.S. states' international offices and a higher level of economic interdependence help states attract FDI, and the paper argues that extension of institutional approaches from IPE may be valuable for future research about the international capabilities of subnational governments and their leaders.     

Critical Pedagogy for the Present Moment: Learning from the Avant-Garde to Teach Globalization from Experiences

Closer to us in what it integrates and in its consequences, global politics still gets conceptualized as if it belonged to a realm of its own, disembedded and abstracted beyond quotidian experiences of power. Still folded in a supernatural world that cannot be of their making, as far from experience as their cold war predecessors were, international studies (IS) students are as alienated and find it as hard to work with critical imagination.
To teach students to be more than mere technicians of whatever new world order may be born of present circumstances, we have to unmake the political separation that still exists between the study and teaching of global politics and everyday life in the world economy.
This article presents a record of a decade-long teaching experiment conducted in the department of political science at Laval University in Québec City. Borrowing techniques and inspiration from the "historical avant-garde," I have worked to reinvent my pedagogical practice to create "situations" in which students can be full, unalienated subjects in the learning process.     

Global Societies Are Social Things: A Conceptual Reassessment

This article reassesses the concept of a global society in light of recent historical analyses of the concepts of the social and society in the literature of International Relations. It is argued that the distinction between the social and society makes many theories of a global society indistinguishable from a global social system. However, it is also argued that those conceptions of a global society that emphasise its societal qualities are vulnerable to charges of Eurocentricity and methodological nationalism. To point the way forward, this article argues that, analytically, the features of the concept of a global society need to be conceived more diversely and the feature of a meaningful collective-self-narrative, or weness feeling, needs to be reconceived as relationally contested, rather than consistently consensual. With this conceptual revision, it is suggested that, empirically, the contents of a relationally contested collective-self-narrative at the transnational “level” are still elusive, and a topic for further research, but would likely attain a “post-Western” and ecological character if they were to emerge in practice.     

The Role of Play and Humor in Creative Conflict Management

In this article, I draw on the theories of three scholars whose works have not typically been part of the negotiation and conflict resolution canon (Arthur Koestler, Edward T. Hall, and Gregory Bateson) to develop the beginnings of a new model for creative and constructive conflict transformation that features playfulness and humor as its key components. I explore the connections between Koestler's theory of bisociation in the act of creation, Hall's ideas about the cultural construction of emotional responses, and Bateson's theories about the role of play and humor in human communication. All three authors focused particularly on body language and on the cognitive impact of emotions. Drawing on their theories and the connections between them, I suggest the theoretical underpinnings of a model for approaching conflict in which displacements and surprises, playfulness, humor, and "punch lines" can serve to reframe issues and open up new avenues for consensus building and resolution.     

Bracing for Cold Peace. US-Russia Relations after Ukraine

Despite rising back to prominence during the global economic turmoil, the International Monetary Fund remains under severe pressure over its lack of legitimacy and effectiveness. It is surrounded by increasingly vibrant and potentially competing systems of regional financial arrangements. But while it is feared that regional arrangements can undermine the global financial order, they can also help buttress the multilateral institutions that are struggling to manage an increasingly complex global economy. The purpose of this article is to draw on trade, exploring the decades-long efforts to ensure compatibilities between regional trade agreements and the multilateral trading system, to offer lessons to financial policymakers.     

Location "Authority" in the Global Political Economy

This article addresses the problematic nature of "authority" in the global political economy. Focusing on the rules governing international commercial relations, which today form part of the juridical conditions of global capitalism, the location and structure of political authority are argued to be historically specific. They have changed with the emergence of different historic blocs and as a result of consequent alterations in state-societyrelations. The article emphasizes the significance of private corporate power in the construction of the global political economy and hegemonic authority relations. However, the significance of private authority is obscure and little understood by students of international relations. This gives rise to analytical and normative grounds for adopting a historical materialist approach to theanalysis of global authority that incorporates national, subnational, and transnational influences.     

A More Turbulent and Troubled World

The year 2016 marked the 25th anniversary of the end of the Cold War and the 15th anniversary of the 9/11 attack.Though international relations are constantly adjusted,the world is by no means more stable and orderly.International order reshaping triggered by the 2008 financial crisis is deepening,with chaos of various kinds popping up here and there.In the sociopolitical field,the "Trump phenomenon" and Brexit indicate serious weakening of the authority of traditional political systems and elites.In major country relations and international security,the world is witnessing the rise of emerging countries and the and fall of the West,fiercer US-Russia and Sino-US wrestling of strategic significance,and greater global and regional security risks.In global governance,while adjustment of UN-centered global governance is laboring along,national rivalries touch core issues,making global governance more urgent.     

Surveys,Experiments, and the Landscape of International Political Economy

The contributions to this issue show that surveys and experiments offer exciting new tools for doing empirical research in international political economy (IPE). This essay cautions that the utility of these tools is not self-evident: Neither appeals to microfoundations nor to methodological individualism in constructing explanations for social phenomena themselves recommend an embrace of surveys or experiments. The field of IPE should worry that the focus on surveys and experiments will constrain not just methodological choice but also theoretical breadth, limiting the field’s ability to conceive of what theories are admissible in learning about the global political economy.     

A Multifunctional Case Study for Teaching International Political Economy: The World Economic Forum as Shar–pei or Wolf in Sheep's Clothing?

The protests against the WTO in Seattle and against the World Economic Forum in Davos and New York present vivid images of conflicting interests in the global economy. Teachers of International Political Economy have an opportunity to use a series of recent or ongoing dynamic case studies to introduce students to theory, history, empirical investigation, and current issues. The evolution of the WEF is a strong example of a multifunctional case study, as it links a current, ongoing issue with high media visibility to many of the major theoretical traditions and debates in IPE. Over its first thirty years of operation the WEF controlled the narrative of its own evolution, portraying itself as a unique venue for business leaders and public officials to discuss issues and solve problems. However, the telecommunications revolution made the WEF's agenda of self–promotion a victim of its own success. The effectiveness of the WEF's efforts to market itself as a key communication channel between major participants in the predominant liberal market configuration of the global economy, symbolized by the meeting of Bill Clinton and Bill Gates at Davos 2000, attracted critics, such as NGOs that embraced alternate visions of globalization. Some critics in turn have become participants, which has shifted the discourse of the WEF in ways unintended by its corporate members and thereby created the possibility for the WEF to become a site for contesting the existing structure of the global economy.     

Transregional security cooperation after September 11, 2001

The aim of this article is to answer the question what kind of global security architecture emerged after September 11 and what functions Europe, East Asia and the United States assumed in this triadic structure. The empirical findings reveal that the transpacific security cooperation is the strengthening link in this global security structure, the transatlantic security cooperation the weakening one and the Asia–Europe Security Cooperation is to be seen as the emerging link. In order to explain these different institutional manifestations of transregional cooperation, different theories of International Relations are applied to the three cases. It comes as no surprise that neoinstitutionalism and constructivism offer the best insights into the formation and development of international institutions.

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